A quarter of Section Five for The Third Place (1st Ed.) has been finished. I managed to acquire some new information on Viktor Gruen that I felt should be brought to the attention of the ARPLAN Blog. It’s one of those areas in my research where someone or something in the late 20th century has its antecedent or their origins in the early 20th century. Right now, I am writing a message to Bogumil about the significance of what I had found for his own research.
The Social-Democratic affiliations of Gruen were covered in a fairly recent book, entitled, Free-Market Socialists: European Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1968. Its author, Joseph Malherek, was trying to make an argument that I had recalled Ernst Jünger positing in Der Arbeiter.
In Der Arbeiter, Jünger argued that “Nationalism” and “Socialism,” as they were conceived in the 19th century, are products of that earlier epoch and cannot readily adapt to the State of Total Mobilization. One version of Nationalism (like Yugoslav Nationalism or Czechoslovak Nationalism) can be opposed by the competing claims of another version of Nationalism (like Croat and Serb Nationalism or Czech and Slovak Nationalism). Conversely, Socialism cannot become a viable alternative to Capitalism if it strives to be too idealistic and utopian to the point of becoming incapable of existing without Capitalism because a Liberal Capitalist can exploit Socialist ideas to pursue their own ideological aims.
This conclusion is a perfectly sound one insofar as real Liberal Capitalists like John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek were also realizing that the old Liberal ideal of abolishing the Civil Government of Parliament for the Market (i.e. elimination of the role of government in economic life) entirely can no longer be achieved within the State of Total Mobilization. Thus, in their respective works, they recognized that the Parliament should instead be used to promote the aims of the Market, thereby creating a Liberalization of Young Minds. In The Third Place (1st Ed.), I refer to that phenomenon by pointing out how Production for Profit and Production for Utility are interchangeable because they both share the same metaphysical paradigm.
For Malherek, I am not surprised that concluded his book by arguing for a synthetic view of Capitalism and Socialism. He insisted that neither can exist without the other. His general argument is that Socialism cannot exist without Capitalism. But reading between the lines, I am convinced that he was referring to the First and Second Modes of Production, Production for Profit and Production for Utility.
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